Tuesday 22 February 2011

Programming shortcuts and Reading Up.

You know what I want to learn when I start my new studies next year? An efficient way to alter character models in-game without just cutting through pre-rendered, pre-designed seams. Gibs used to be innovative, but these days it just annoys me to see that, in most games an some animated movies, they take cheap shortcuts. The first shortcut is the instagib or partial gib. Return a character to it’s giblets. Left arm, right arm, they all detach. Or just a single one, such as, for example, the head. Second shortcut is by way of texture-edit. Say that a character gets stabbed, or shot, or whatever. There’s the tearing of clothes, the spurting of blood, the gnashing of teeth, etc... However, if you would edit that exact frame of the game in a 3D-editing tool, and just remove the knife from the frame, you’d just have the original character model, with a bloodsplatter added to its texture. While you wouldn’t think this is visible, because there’s a knife in the way, that’s not exactly true. When you cut your meat, you can see the area around the part you’re cutting move as well. It’s not like your knife slices through a hologram. But that’s what either the knife or the character model often look like. The knife didn’t cut them, it went clean in. But this is nitpicking. This problem is, however, visible in a second example, and far more prominent at that: vegetation. I’ve yet to see a game where grass looks good. It’s either directly painted on the floor, which is just lazy, or it’s grass holograms that aren’t correctly elevated. Or a combination of both. But it doesn’t look like grass. No matter how good a game is, no matter how advanced the console or the graphics or the engine, they still can’t get two things right: grass and hair (Okay. Hair, I get)

I just want to see if I can find a way to solve that. Maybe a system that gets rid of the clean divide between textures and polygons. Polygon textures would be useful, for example. A stab-wound where the hole is pasted on the character, but actually has depth. And no cheating! No putting holes in a character and then filling up the hole with meat.


Anyway.


It's been 20 days since an update, so here's a curious cat wondering what I've been doing in that time.

Well, curious cat , I'll tell you. I've been wasting my time. Duh. You don't have to ask that. Anyway. Here's a list of things I'm not going to dress up as, for future reference. Do not attempt to make me. That would result in the death of at least one of the parties involved, probably both. Really. For no reason will I dress up as one of these. I have no desire to. Some of these are because I find it degrading to do so, others are because I don't want to, not even for, and especially not, as a joke, which is degrading for the people in question (eg: transvestites and the like. (My point being: pretending to be a transvestite as a joke is not funny. Since I am not, I do not have the urge to dress up as such. However, I get it. It is therefor not a joking matter))

Here it is:

  • Smurfs
  • Babies
  • Half- or fully-naked people
  • Women
  • Anyone under the age of 16, really
  • Handicapped people, as a joke.
  • Indians
  • Probably not Na'vi.
Things I will dress up as:
  • Ninjas
  • Pirates
  • Star Trek characters
  • Star Wars characters (not jabba, of course)
  • G-men
  • Army Personnel
  • 40k Marines

5 comments:

  1. I'd like to see you in an ewok costume.

    Oh, and please never ever dress up as 'G-man7' >.>

    ReplyDelete
  2. G-men: men in black.
    And Ewoks are mosty nekkid

    ReplyDelete
  3. I know what G-men are. 'twas a joke, sillykums.

    And you could wear a fur suit? >.>

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anyway, if you want to dress up as a Space Marine, I'd suggest wearing contacts. Glasses would look horribly out of character.

    (I know, I know. Miss Perfect Eyesight has easy talking. >.<)

    ReplyDelete
  5. I could wear glasses under the big-ass helmet.
    And should have mentioned fursuits as things I won't wear.

    ReplyDelete